Hybrid auto-adaptable simulated annealing based heuristic

in this paper we introduce a heuristic based on the well known Simulated Annealing (SA) technique, which is designed to solve scheduling problems in hybrid flowshop organisations. The main interest of this heuristic is that the control parameters of the SA are automatically tuned during a learning phase. Moreover, the algorithm takes the bottlenecks into consideration to increase the quality of the solutions. After a brief introduction to SA and its application to the flowshop scheduling problem, we make a critical and experimental analysis of the control parameters and we suggest a method to compute them automatically, according to the time that user wants to spend computing the solution. Finally, we discuss some strategic elements about the layout of the computation and we put all together to get the Hybrid Auto-adaptable Simulated Annealing based Heuristic (HASAH).